Radio base station systems (RBSs) operate to provide communication for one or more wireless user equipment units over one or more radio access networks of a cellular communication system. A radio access network is used by service providers to establish one or more point-to-point communication paths, e.g., such as a communication between two smart phones, a smart phone and a data server, and the like. An RBS has one or more radio equipment control (REC) devices, one or more radio equipment (RE) devices connected to one or more antennas that are used to facilitate the point-to-point communication paths defined by the service providers. The REC devices operate to communicate with the radio access networks via a network interface and the RE devices operate in conjunction with the antennas to communicate with the wireless user equipment units, such as smart phones, via an air interface which transmits and receives signals over the one or more antennas. The REC and RE devices operate with each other via the one or more interface links. The point-to-point information that is transmitted is streaming information based upon a particular streaming protocol, wherein a streaming protocol is a continuous stream of information that cannot be put on hold and has no re-transmission capabilities and, as such the interface links need to be operational for all communication to keep data from being dropped.
A typical RBS has a REC connected to a RE via an interface link having properties that are defined during a negotiation process. The properties are based upon the requests of one or more service providers. For example, a particular interface link can communicate information for multiple service providers, such as ATT, Sprint, and the like, and the amount of data, e.g., the data rate, the link communicates for each service provider, and the allocation and quality of each service provider's bandwidth, with respect to individual point-to-point communications generally referred to as antenna carriers in the CPRI specification, is defined by the service provider. To change the established properties of the link, the communication of streaming information over the link must be stopped in order to reconfigure the relevant properties of the link and the communication can only be restarted after the reconfiguration process has completed and at a specific communication data synchronization point. Such result in meaningful down time resulting in the loss of streaming data, and impacting the quality of service of the RBS.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.